LATEST THINKING

Accenture Technology Vision 2016. Focus on Pega® Technology.

Overview

The principal theme running through the 2016 Accenture Technology Vision is “People First.” So what do we mean by that? In essence, winning in the digital age hinges not just on using the latest technologies, but also developing an organizational and corporate culture that can fully take advantage of what these technologies have to offer.

Pega® and Accenture are increasingly seeing leading enterprises adopting technology as the new member of the workforce. Rather than replacing people, or simply supporting their work, technology is enabling people to do things differently and to do new things. And that’s a fundamental shift.

The ability to automate business processes is a major source of efficiency. But perhaps more importantly, using intelligence to provision and personalize is creating whole new ways to work, and to deliver the service that customer’s value. It’s no longer a case of people vs machines. It’s the right combination of people and machines that’s driving the greatest breakthroughs in performance.

We examine the five key trends from this year’s Technology Vision—Intelligent Automation, Liquid Workforce, Platform Economy, Predictable Disruption and Digital Trust—and provide examples showing how Pega technology resonates with and plays out in this year’s analysis.

Intelligent Automation

Leaders embrace automation because they know it’s the secret to overcoming the breakneck pace of digital change. The true visionaries use intelligent automation to create a new digital world where they are masters of competitive advantage. Their latest recruits include machines and software intelligence that they are using to bring new skills to help their people do new jobs and invent a new future for themselves and the organization.

Intelligent automation brings fundamental changes to how businesses and individuals work. Machines have different strengths and capabilities that complement their human supervisors. Together, they’re changing what’s possible.
When it comes to providing intelligent automation, one of the core strengths of Pega solutions is the ability to automate across disparate systems and leverage existing corporate assets. That means older legacy technology environments can secure the benefits of automation without the necessity of extensive and expensive re-architecting. In addition, the ability to operate across channels can bring front-office and back-office together to create seamless customer services and interactions that are one of the hallmarks of intelligent automation.

Liquid Workforce

In the digital era, leaders understand that a change-ready workforce is a prerequisite for success. But the requirements for managing a digital workforce are very different from traditional approaches to talent. The workforce needs new skills and has new expectations to match. How can companies attract, build and retain the differentiated talent they need—without losing them to digital native competitors? Delivering the right experiences and interactions is key.

Together, Accenture and Pega are helping address the challenges of a changing workforce and enable HR process and workforce transformation across the globe. One of the key challenges they face in an ever-faster digitally driven environment is the speed with which new recruits can be on-boarded to make them as productive as possible, as quickly as possible. Using the intelligent automation capabilities in Pega solutions helps streamline HR processes across organizational boundaries, systems and channels to significantly reduce onboarding cycle time and enable individuals joining a new organization to get up to speed as rapidly as possible.

Platform Economy

Industry leaders are unleashing technology’s power by developing new technology platforms. Tech companies and digital-born organizations (DBOs) like Amazon, Google, and Alibaba have long understood the power of digital technologies. But look a little closer. Many of their most ground-breaking products and services are based on platforms. DBOs’ success rests on two key elements: the technology platforms they’ve built to support their businesses, and the business models these platforms enable. These platform-based business models fundamentally change how they operate. In the digital economy, platform ecosystems are nothing less than the foundation for new value creation.

One example, from the healthcare sector, offers a great illustration of these new platform-based business models in action. With Accenture’s help, a global life sciences company has created a platform-based, data-driven digital health solution helping hospitals improve patient outcomes and reducing avoidable costs for patients with chronic cardiovascular diseases. The solution uses advanced analytics to drive actionable insights into care coordination and patient population health patterns. These reveal opportunities for improving the consistency and efficiency of care coordination. Using Pega technologies, the solution enables providers to make more proactive and informed decisions based on insights into the patient population. Ultimately, this results in improved patient care, from hospital to in-home support—and fewer avoidable readmissions.

Predictable Disruption

Fast-emerging digital ecosystems—such as precision agriculture, the industrial internet or smart cities—are creating foundations for the next big wave of enterprise disruption. Digital ecosystems like these, and the businesses that power them, are already straddling markets and blurring industry boundaries.

While they raise the threat from new competitors entering the market, they also create opportunities for large enterprises to disrupt new and existing markets, leveraging their scale and technology capabilities to do so. One example comes from a large Brazilian convergent telecom that’s in the process of implementing the advanced analytics capabilities in Pega solutions to disrupt its industry sector with highly targeted, personalized service offerings for every customer. These will build an integrated “quadruple play” solution that will threaten the position of providers in cable, TV, broadband and mobile segments.

Pega technologies enable customized bundling of services based on accurate predictions of likely customer needs. While bundling is a complex process, these technologies are used to simplify the customer experience by creating exactly the right offering, at the right price point, for every customer.

Digital Trust

As each piece of the business world goes digital, opportunities to catalyze change and scale operations increase exponentially. Unfortunately, this increased ability to scale also brings increased exposure to systemic risks.

Consumers, particularly millennials, are increasingly prepared to share their information with the companies and services they use. The potential to apply data analytics to learn more about them and deliver truly personalized offerings, can really support a company’s differentiation in a crowded marketplace.

But the willingness to share should not be misinterpreted as an open invitation. Consumers will respond positively only when an offer is appropriate to their individual context and progress along the customer lifecycle.

This is where the ability of Pega solutions to create context-specific recommendations is so powerful. The right interventions at the right time, can help build a trusted relationship, which remains on the right side of personal without wandering into territory that the consumer will consider intrusive. Companies need to make sure they use the potential of analytics wisely. Without that safeguard, trust, which takes years to build, can be shattered in an instant.

Conclusion

By taking advantage of key Pega solution capabilities—process automation, provisioning and personalization—companies can use technology in a way that embodies the “People first” mentality. Automation and disruptive capabilities are undoubtedly powerful. But the real strength of Pega solution capabilities is that companies can deploy them to train their people how to use the data they gather and share in innovative new ways that build valuable customer trust. By providing the data that’s needed to make decisions that respect the trust customers have invested in them, companies can start to realize an almost limitless source of value. But this is only possible when people and technology are truly working together.

Select your location

No results found

We were unable to find a match for "$searchstring." Try searching again by using different or more general keywords and check for spelling errors.

RECOMMENDED CONTENT

FILTER RESULTS

FILTER RESULTS

Connect with our Talent Community

Personalize your Accenture Career search and receive tailored news, insights and job alerts. Join our Talent Connection to learn more about the challenging and rewarding career opportunities offered by Accenture.